Research Trip To Appalachia

By Mark O'Connor

I took a trip to Appalachia to discover more about some of the first people that settled in the hollows in areas like Newman's Ridge, Hancock County, Tennessee and Wise County, Virginia. Some picturesque country side indeed. There is a group called the Melungeons considered tri-racial isolates, whose origins in Appalachia are now thought by many to go back to the 1500's.

My interest in the " Melungeon Movement" is about identifying more accurately the source of southern string band music, and more broadly the genesis of American cultural arts. It has been widely acknowledged that American music is equal part European culture, Black African culture and maybe a few doses of Latino culture as well. The tri-racial theory opens up the Mongoloid racial mix, and the obvious component for this part of it is Native American. But recently there has been a new theory floated in that the original ancestry of the Melungeon group just may have been Turkish or Portuguese. According to Spanish ship documents from the 1500's exploring America coming to the coasts of what is now Virginia and North Carolina, Spanish explorers kept Turkish slaves and Portuguese slaves on these boats and would drop them off on America's coast to fend for themselves while sometimes heading down to the Caribbean to capture more slaves to work the ships on the way back to Spain. There was quite a flow of Moorish people between Turkey and Portugal during that time, and often the Spaniards would utilize the Portuguese for their slave labor. Many of these people were Turks.

This newfound component from the culture of the Mediterranean area brings an exotic answer to what I have always considered the missing link in the evolution of American music. Could one of the most important cultures in the world, that of Asia, be a strong component of what we now identify as American Music?

The flow of trade and art on the Silk Road spanned from the Far East to near Asia including Turkey of course. Some of the Asian cultural makeup could have found its way through the Moorish slaves when they were freed to settle the Appalachian Mountains. Because white settlers oppressed these people by the 1600's they were inclined to blend in with Native American tribes in the area as well as being able to identify with the runaway Black slaves taking harbor in these communities and ultimately marrying in to the various outcast groups in a sense making another cultural "group" identified in the mountain regions of Appalachia to this day.

This is an amazing story I know. But for me it just got even more interesting on this trip. My point in meeting a lot of these Melungeon people was to ask them how they felt differently from their fellow European descended white Appalachian neighbors? Every time I asked the question, it seemed it was the question that stumped everybody. A lot of shrugging shoulders, and almost an uncomfortable silence. So much that I thought there is something underlying here.

I started to then re-phrase the question to various Melungeons I came in to contact with by thrusting out a possible theory instead. I would put forth the notion that if they could not identify a unique cultural existence that they themselves as a group had maintained through out the hundreds of years in this region, then is it not probable that the Melungeon culture is more simply what we know as Appalachian culture today? This theory brought in much more light it seemed, and it was quite revealing what information followed. There were different conversations with various Melungeons that resulted in identifying nearly every Bluegrass legend or patriarch as a person who has Melungeon ancestry! Except for Bill Monroe.

The names that I heard from these Melungeons who knew Melungeon relatives of these bluegrass superstars was a who's who list; Jimmy Martin, Carter and Ralph Stanley, The Osborne Brothers, Jim and Jesse and Mac Wiseman. Even Lester Flatte was rumored to be. I am still not sure about Earl Scruggs but could be likely that there are family ties as well. I met a Melungeon whose father and grandfather played the three finger style banjo picking which would pre-date Scruggs and it is likely that he would have been influenced by local pickers like these folks in his community. Is it possible that Bluegrass is Melungeon music?

This brings me to some conjecture about Bill Monroe, the father of Bluegrass Music. I read a recent interview of Ralph Stanley's where he was not giving much credit to Monroe for originating Bluegrass. Stanley was indicating that he himself played "traditional" Bluegrass, and Monroe cam along (later evidently) and slicked it up some. It is seems a very tall order to claim that you were a traditional exponent of an idiom before the music was invented? What is more interesting in this interview is that he seemed to show some contempt for Monroe, this after a life long position of being a self described "student" of his. When I first read this I thought it was simply a cheap shot taken at "the competition" who is now dead and gone, but there might be something more at play here?

There had also been a notorious feud between Jimmy Martin and Monroe since Martin had been a member of Monroes's Bluegrass Boys in the '50's. Martin claims among other things that Monroe "kept him off the Opry." It is true

that most all of the Bluegrass legends were named Opry members back in the

day, except notably Jimmy Martin who was described in his billings through the years as the "King Of Bluegrass."

The feud between Martin and Monroe was real as I even witnessed some of it up close myself. I got the occasion to play with all of these bluegrass legends at one time or another.

I was visiting the historical society in Wise, Virginia, another Melungeon community stronghold (Ralph Stanley still lives in this area) and I noticed on a shelf a book about the feuding Hatfields and McCoys. This infamous story involved a Kentucky family and a Virginia family which ended tragically. Is there some kind of parallel universe there that has held over? Monroe from Kentucky, Stanleys and others from Virginia, East Tennessee and other Melungeon areas.

Also there has been some history of Bill Monroe lifting tunes from his fiddlers and musicians through the years. I have heard the first hand accounts of this scenario repeated over and over from many of my fiddling heroes. It seemed rather easy for Monroe to hear something that someone else came up with and then take it from them and slap his own name on it for the writer's credit. If this is the climate in which Monroe helped to create, then it would stand to reason that there could be some basis that Monroe heard the Melungeon's string band music in the 1920's and 1930's and adopted the style to his own group. Monroe interestingly did not put forth the name "Bluegrass" for his music regularly, (named after his own native state of Kentucky) until the 1960's. He became the dominant force in the music in part by claiming ownership.

That kind of staking claim could be hard to validate if the story of this oppressed Melungeon community of musicians across the state line were developing it all along in their own communities. I guess one would have to ask themselves this obvious question. The Stanleys grew up singing and playing their music. The Appalachian communities were somewhat isolated in those days. Is it more likely that the Stanleys learned to play Bluegrass in their childhood from Monroe over in Kentucky, or did they learn the music from their folks and other musicians in their community?

Mark O'Connor 6/04

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